


Three times that Zoro was never captured (and one time that he really was)

by lily22 (segfault)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 18:59:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16414055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/segfault/pseuds/lily22
Summary: That feeling when you land yourself in the infirmary, and all you have for company are Zoro's terrible stories...





	Three times that Zoro was never captured (and one time that he really was)

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on LJ, 2009/08/23

**1.**  
  
“Have you ever swallowed a flaming sword? I saw it done once, when I was younger. It’s quite the riveting act.”   
  
Zoro stirred groggily at the mention of swords, but as nothing else seemed worth his attention, he let his head settle back against… well, whatever it was he was tied to. Felt like some kind of pole, or a big tree trunk. The canopy above him wasn’t leaf, though, but a garish assortment of primary colors, stitched together swatch against swatch and run around with dangling cables and a funny walkway. Where the hell was he?  
  
“We don’t have an act like that in our circus,” the voice went on, apparently content to blather at a captive audience. “They keep telling me I should be the one to do it,  _me_ , like being a swordsman means I should be expected to swallow swords too. But, then again, Captain Buggy gets what Captain Buggy wants.”   
  
Buggy? That name rang the faintest of bells. As he lazily tugged at the bonds holding his hands above his head, he gave the muscles of his memory an absent stretch as well. Buggy, where had he heard that name before? Buggy…  
  
“You might not have known this, but swallowing isn’t the hard part. With a couple weeks of practice—and a few mishaps, I admit, minor mishaps—I was swallowing swords with ease. Breathing fire  _out_  isn’t a big deal either, all smoke and mirrors, if you get my drift.”  
  
A bright red nose drifted into his memory, bulbous and prominent enough that his bound fingers twitched to squeeze it until it popped. Buggy from East Blue, that’s right, so this had to be one of his clowns. Zoro studied the half-face and checkered scarf without much interest, only waiting to see if a name would come to him. Cabbage, wasn’t it? The guy’s name was Cabbage. Shit, no wonder he didn’t feel intimidated at all. You knew you were pretty low in the pecking order when your main predators were fluffy bunny rabbits.   
  
“No, swallowing and exhaling, that’s all quite simple. But putting a sword down my throat  _while it’s on fire_? That’s a whole different matter. You’re a swordsman too, you should know how it is.”  
  
The familiar cry of metal on metal called out to Zoro, a familiar jolt as distinctive to him as a fingerprint. It was a sword—not any sword, but Wadou Ichimonji, and the bastard had actually dared put his filthy hands on Wadou’s hilt and drawn it from its sheath.  
  
“Steel is cold, reliable. You tell it where to go, and it goes.” With his free hand, Cabbage picked up a bottle of grease, as though completely unaware that he’d just dug his own grave deeply, or that he’d be filling it in a second if he let a drop of that grease touch Wadou.   
  
Zoro’s wrists twisted in their bonds as he growled a warning, but unbelievably, methodically, Cabbage began to wipe grease all along the blade, letting the excess drip to the floor in slow, fat splatters.   
  
“Fire, on the other hand, is less predictable.” He struck a match and held it to Wadou’s blade, lighting his own funeral pyre as surely as he set the katana alight in a sudden wreath of flame.   
  
“Unlike steel, fire obeys no one, not even itself. It travels at the whim of changing drafts, and answers to no rhyme nor reason.” He held the burning sword in front of Zoro for his inspection, mistook murderous rage for fear and chuckled darkly to himself.   
  
“A slight gust, and then it’s your face on fire, your throat, your lungs… Well, I never did get the hang of it, but let’s see if you’ll do better, hm? Open wide…”  
  
And Zoro did. He opened his big mouth, and in the moment of hesitation, as Cabbage wondered why his captive was cooperating with his own torture, Zoro lunged. Cabbage was standing a prudent distance away, but Wadou Ichimonji, ever faithful, was just close enough to reach. A sharp pull of his neck, and Zoro snapped up the blade in his jaw, gripping it securely between his teeth and ignoring the way the metal seared against his lips. That would leave a burn, but it was nothing for a swordsman to be marked by his sword.  
  
“Should’ve tied my hands behind me,” Zoro grinned around the blade, and swung his head around to cut himself free. Wadou went into his left hand, and his right came up to crush the flames from his mouth, easy as wiping away saliva.   
  
“Guess I’m just not cut out for sword swallowing.” Zoro glanced around for his remaining two katana, spotted them against the nearest tent wall. He’d been told often that he grinned like a shark, but he’d never understood until he’d smiled in genuine relief, and Cabbage had fallen over himself in his haste to get away.   
  
“Why don’t you show me how it’s done?”  
  
  
  
**2.**  
  
Zoro had been traveling for a long time, seen a lot of things, which meant he’d also had a lot of people try to lock him up. Go to enough weird places with nothing on you but katana, and eventually there’s bound to be someone wanting to put you in a cell or some shit.   
  
This wasn’t like that. He’d just been sailing around East Blue, calm as you please, waiting for the shore to show up again after it’d disappeared on him. And maybe in all that drifting around, he’d drifted off, or maybe it’d been a damn fast ship, because next thing he knew, this massive net was swooping down on him. All he saw was a gridded shadow cast in the water all around him, and then his whole boat was being swept up, and half of the entire damn ocean along with it. Pressed up against coarse, brine-crusted ropes, in close quarters with slimy fish wriggling in places they really shouldn’t’ve been, there was no room for him to draw a single katana. Luckily, he still had teeth.  
  
In the end, the fishing schooner probably didn’t catch much of anything, not with that giant tear in its net, but at least Zoro had fish to eat that night.   
  
  
  
**3.**  
  
“That’s him, Yosaku.”  
  
“The one who’s been stealing all of our bounties… and now he has a bounty himself!”  
  
“The hunter,” dramatic pause, “becomes the prey.”  
  
“And the  _other_  hunters that always lost their prey because the first hunter got it first, they now become the  _main_  hunters who hunt the first—Yeah, actually, I like what you said.”  
  
Johnny checked the picture on the bounty poster, then the form lying prone on the road before them. “That’s definitely him, all right. What should we do, Yosaku?”  
  
“Well,” pondered Yosaku, “how about we… pretend to have bounties, and then when he comes after us, we turn around and nab him instead!”   
  
The two of them thought about this together. Then they thought about how Roronoa had taken down Hammer-Fist Mitchell, 20 000 beli bounty and all, before staggering three miles through the forest with his entrails all but spilling out of his stomach, flinging enemies off him the whole way like a dog scratches fleas.   
  
It was a long, involved thought. They mulled over it very carefully, for some time, but at the end of it, their quarry had yet to move.  
  
“Hey, Johnny, you don’t think he’s…” Yosaku didn’t finish his sentence. Roronoa had collapsed after fending off Mitchell’s numerous companions, each one as strong as their fallen leader and devoted to a fault. Or at least, devoted enough to pursue Roronoa for three miles and drop, one by one, to the same blade that had taken care of their boss.  
  
“It doesn’t seem right to turn him in if we didn’t take him down ourselves, does it?”  
  
“But it’d be a shame to just leave him here,” Johnny rationalized.“Mitchell’s men sure aren’t coming back. Let’s go take a look.”  
  
Johnny boldly approached, taking comfort in the knowledge that his partner was close behind. He prodded Roronoa’s inert form, but the swordsman didn’t so much as twitch in response.  
  
“Hey, look at these katana,” Yosaku called. “Two of them are all broken up, but this one hasn’t got a scratch on it.”  
  
“Huh. Must be pretty well-made,” said Johnny, but he didn’t get up from where he was crouched over the swordsman. Was it just him, or was Roronoa’s chest slowly rising and falling?  
  
“He’s still got a really good hold on it, though—sheesh, but these are  _strong_  fingers, for a corpse.”  
  
“Uhh, Yosaku… About that…” That was definitely a pulse he saw there, jumping in the prominent vein on Roronoa's forehead. This was bad. “Do we still have any of that rope left?”  
  
“Rope? I think it’s still in the pack. Why?”  
  
“Yeah, see… I think this guy might still be alive.”  
  
The two of them reconvened for further thought. Once again, they considered 20 000-beli Mitchell, his followers, the bloody chase through the woods. They thought about all this relatively quickly, and then they leapt as one for the pack. As they hurriedly bound Roronoa’s arms together, though, Yosaku made the mistake of trying to move his katana out of the way. At the touch, Roronoa’s eyes flicked open.   
  
Yosaku had seen a shark once, face to face, when he was younger. He’d never gone swimming again, so the cold, hard glare Roronoa gave him was probably the closest he’d ever come to reliving his old childhood nightmare. He jumped back about ten feet.   
  
“The fuck are you idiots doing with my katana?” demanded Roronoa, apparently unconcerned about the rope being wound around his wrists. A tug, and the rope went slack—okay, so that’s why he wasn’t worried, and weren’t those muscles simply… bulging?  
  
“A-a-admiring it,” stammered Johnny, as Yosaku said, “nothing suspicious!” and quickly began to unwind.  
  
Zoro stared at them both blearily for a moment and then said, “Who  _are_  you, even?”  
  
“J-Johnny,” stammered Johnny, as Yosaku muttered something that might have been, “Y-y-yosaku!”  
  
“You been following me?”  
  
“No!” Yosaku lied.  
  
“Yes!” blurted Johnny, no more honestly, “But not for a bad reason! It’s because we, we really admire you! We want… wewanttobeyourapprentices!!”  
  
The two of them exchanged looks, came to an instantaneous agreement, and cried, “Aniki!!”  
  
“Aniki, huh?” Zoro rubbed his wrists lightly, checked the gash healing over his stomach, and then looked pointedly at the wanted poster in Johnny’s hand, the rope dangling limply from Yosaku’s. His lifted eyebrow said everything, as he hefted his katana and angled it to glint under the sunlight.   
  
“Then, my  _apprentices_ , are we doing this or what?”  
  
  
  
**4.**  
  
“So you don’t gotta feel bad about getting caught,” Zoro finished gruffly, not quite meeting Sanji’s gaze as he inspected the rest of the infirmary from corner to corner. “I mean, it's not like you haven't got enough to feel bad about, being a prissy love cook with no shame and all. But everyone gets caught once in a while.”  
  
Sanji made another weak grasp for his cigarettes. “As if any of that shit you just made up ever really happened,” he scoffed, as Zoro twitched the cardboard packet further out of his reach.  
  
“That obvious?”   
  
“Please. If I’d wanted more convincing lies, I’d have gone to Usopp. Face it, Marimo, you’re just trying to make me feel better, and doing a shitty job of it besides. How were those stories even relevant? You either fought your way out of it in the end or… yeah, you just fought your way out of it. How the hell’s that supposed to help?”  
  
“All right, here’s one for you. Once I made a stupid deal over a girl, turned out the guy was a fucking crook, Luffy had to bust me out. Just like you.” Zoro said this all in short, impatient bursts, before he remembered that he wasn’t going to do any of that sharing crap. Oops.  
  
“You’re actually into girls?” Sanji thought about this. “Shit, you’re actually into  _human beings_?”  
  
“Oi, oi, don’t turn this into one of your perverted fantasies. Kid was like five.”  
  
“Ugh, I didn't want to know,” Sanji said around his cigarette, and—  
  
“How the hell did you get that?!” Zoro immediately snatched it out of his mouth, pinched it out between two fingers.  
  
“Goddammit!” Sanji sulkily fisted the sheets with his non-bandaged hand. “Just  _one_ … Forget it. So? What happened with the deal or whatever?”  
  
“Eh. They tied me up to one of these things, you know.” Zoro sketched a rough cross in the air.  
  
“Could’ve been worse, they could have actually crucified you. They must have thought it was safer to shoot you from a distance.”  
  
“Nah, they didn’t shoot me. Point wasn’t to kill me fast,” Zoro sighed, resigned to talking about this. It was his fault for bringing it up. “I was strong, I was gonna live. A month later, it turns out the bratty son was never going to keep his end of the bargain. Fucker.”  
  
“This really happened, huh?”  
  
“It’s how I met Luffy.”  
  
“Is that right.” Sanji’s expression had gone blank. “They feed you, in all that time?”  
  
“Would’ve defeated the point, wouldn’t it?” Zoro caught the sudden change in Sanji’s mood, and quickly amended, “Rika, the girl, tried to bring me some food at the end. Onigiri.”  
  
“Hm.” A grunt.  
  
“Come on, they only had you a couple days. Even a high-maintenance cook like you can’t’ve starved that badly.”  
  
“What would you know?” Sanji shook his head angrily. “It just… made me remember a different time, okay? And it's not like  _I_  had a sweet little angel descending from on high with offerings of onigiri. How was it?”  
  
“Too sweet,” said Zoro, “got stomped in the dirt by the stupid son.”  
  
“Best damn thing you ever tasted, wasn’t it?”  
  
“Hell yeah.”  
  
The sun was bright through the open windows, the breeze salty and dry.   
  
“Oi, Marimo.”  
  
“Love Cook.”  
  
“I don’t know what’s harder to stand, your ugly mug next to my bed while I’m trying to heal, or the thought of your clumsy ass messing around in my kitchen, but… go make me some onigiri, would you?”  
  
“ _Huh?_ ”  
  
“If a five-year-old girl can do it, I’m sure even you can manage something.”  
  
“Seriously.” Zoro’s sweeping gesture encompassed all the empty plates that surrounded Sanji’s bed, enough to do even Luffy proud. “You're still hungry?”  
  
“I want to taste Rika-chan’s onigiri, that’s all. And I’m sick of having to sit here and listen to you talk. When I get out of this bed—”  
  
“When you get out of this bed, it’ll be a week before Chopper said you can, and you’ll stumble around a little and then fall straight back in. Dumbass.”  
  
“Please. I think you’ve got me confused for a thick-headed idiot with moss for brains.”  
  
Zoro snorted and began to gather up the plates, but Sanji stopped him with his good hand. “Hey, Zoro, listen. I don’t need you to babysit me and make up shitty stories, just because I was weak enough to get myself captured.”  
  
Zoro met his gaze evenly, expectantly.  
  
“But… thanks. Sitting here in this bed all day would’ve been boring as shit otherwise.”  
  
“Heh.” Zoro balanced the plates precariously to open the infirmary door—if he dropped a single one, he was going to find himself lying right here in the next bed, Sanji promised silently—and turned with a grin. Some people said he smiled like a shark, but Sanji could see nothing predatory about it, just teeth, and the curl of his lips, and genuine amusement.   
  
“What’s so funny?” Sanji demanded.   
  
“Nothing, Love Cook. You just sit tight and wait for your onigiri.”


End file.
